My general stuff. This will generally include computer related information, but may also contain general rantings on my part.

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Working with an Iomega StorCenter ix2-200

I just got a 4 TB Iomega StorCenter ix2-200 for use with VMware. The idea is that we can send it to customer locations, copy backups/VMDKs on it, and then ship it back. Previously we had done this with USB drives, but connecting a USB drive to a server is often problematic.

Basic setup for VMware NFS datastores:

Don't enable security

If you do, you have to work through enabling networks to see the individual shares

Enable NFS under Protocols

On the Shares page, under each share there is now a NFS item with the export name

When I was setting this up the first time I ran into some issues. Due to the posts and comments at http://www.krausam.de/?p=33, I was able to use SSH to get a better understanding of the configuration and review logs. To enable SSH,

Go to http://IOMEGAURL/diagnostics.html (a hidden page)

Under Support Access, click Allow remote access for support

SSH to the device

User: root

Password: sohoadmin

If you enabled security on the device, the password is soho + yourpassword

Problems making NFS work.

When trying to mount the NFS partition, my ESX server kept erroring out. The vmkernel log reported "WARNING: NFS: 946: MOUNT RPC failed with RPC status 13 (RPC was aborted due to timeout) trying to mount". The logs on the Iomega showed the mount request was being authenticated, but the mount never succeeded.